Émigré Jews and Film Noir
Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.
Instructor: J. Hoberman
Largely working under the radar, German and Austrian Jewish emigres like Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer introduced a classic Hollywood style of the 1940s while the children of Jewish immigrants, Jules Dassin and Abraham Polonsky (both later blacklisted for their Communist affiliations), helped politicize it. The course will focus on individual films—including Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), Ulmer’s Detour (1945) and Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948)—as well as the backstories of their writer/directors. It is up to students to decide in what way, if at all, the films are Jewish and their makers Jews.
Course Materials:
Advanced screenings will be required for each class.
Recommended (but by no means required) reading: Vincent Brook, Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir; Gerd Gemunden, Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951; Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names.
Students may wish to refresh their recollections of Hollywood classics Casablanca (1943) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), which, although not examples of film noir, are likely to come as points of reference.
Questions? Read our 2026 Winter Program FAQ.
J. Hoberman is an author, teacher, and film critic (33 years at The Village Voice). His many books include Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds, The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, and, with Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, written for the 2003 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. A contributor to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe and POLIN Museum’s Legacy of Polish Jews, Professor Hoberman taught for many years at the Cooper Union, as well as NYU, the University of Hawaii, Harvard University and currently, Columbia University, where his most recent graduate seminars have been devoted to documentary activism. He continues to contribute film criticism to The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. His most recent book is Everything is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. Many years ago, he had a paid internship at YIVO.
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